Red Hot Lies

“With Max?”

“We didn’t quite make it. His mother decided to come in early.”

I groaned. “Oh, boy.”

“Yeah. Oh, boy. I had to get the hell out of there.”

“So what did you do?”

“Drank too much.” Q looked down at his desk. “Look, Iz, I’ve got to tell you something. Elliot came down and got the Casey file this morning. Said he would finish the Motion to Dismiss.”

“Great. I’ve been asking him to help me for weeks.”

Elliot Nuster was an associate assigned to me. He had a stick-up-his-butt personality, but who could blame him when he also had to work with Tanner. Since Elliot was a year ahead of me, I often felt awkward giving him work, always having to ask nicely, and usually over and over again. But I simply couldn’t handle all the Pickett work myself. Luckily, many of the projects or cases that came in the door from Pickett could be farmed out to the specialty groups—our intellectual-property people or the tax department—but the rest was mine and it was a struggle to keep on top of it, especially when I had to beg my associate to help.

“Yeah, it sounds good,” Q said. “But it’s weird, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“He never offers to help.”

“No lawyer ever offers to help, but if Elliot heard what happened, he’s probably just chipping in, right?”

“Probably.”

Q and I locked eyes.

“What are you going to do now?” he asked.

I looked at my watch, a Baume & Mercier given to me by Forester. The image of his covered form on the hospital bed made tears tug at the insides of my eyes. Then I thought of something equally unpleasant. “I have to call Sam’s mom.”

As I spoke the words to Lynette, Sam’s mother—gone since yesterday, no sign of him, looks like he took Forester’s shares from the safe—the sky outside my office window grew dark. Rain swooped into the area, bruising the sky with patches of deep gray.

“I don’t understand.” Lynnette said. “What?” Her voice caught. I could tell she was trying not to cry, struggling for an answer. Just like me.

I pressed the phone to my ear, giving her any details I knew, which weren’t many.

“This isn’t right,” Lynette said. “I’m his mother. I brought that boy into the world, and I raised him. He is not a thief. There has to be a reason.”

Silently, I looked out at the rain. I nodded. But what that reason was, I couldn’t imagine.

When I was off the phone with Sam’s mom, I called every other friend of Sam’s I had a phone number for. Trying not to alarm anyone, I asked simply if they’d seen him yesterday. The answer was always no.

I looked at my watch. I called Mark Carrington to see if he’d learned anything new, but his assistant told me, in a frosty voice, that he was in meetings.

Panic started to rise in me, as much from futility as fear. Sam—disappeared. Forester—dead.

But Forester’s company was still here. Which meant Forester needed me.

I picked up a contract I needed to work on—Jane Augustine’s new one, but the words swam in front of me, like a bunch of tiny black fish in a white sea.

A memory crept into my mind of another day when I couldn’t concentrate on work. A year ago, the day Sam and I got engaged.

It was the week after Thanksgiving, and we were each in our respective offices, ostensibly working but at the same time sending a bevy of flirty instant messages back and forth. Outside, the temperature had hit a bizarre sixty degrees, making everyone in the office gaze wistfully out the window.

I had just finished a letter that would be sent to the hundreds of employees of Pickett Enterprises, explaining the new paternity-leave policy, an easy task because it gave new dads a paid week off work. I called out to Q that I was e-mailing it to him, and I hit Send. But when I tried to move on to something new, I had a hard time focusing.

A message from Sam popped up on my computer with a pleasing ding. Hey Red Hot, it said, Want to play hooky and pretend we’re rock stars?

I wrote back, It’s 1:00 on a Wednesday.

Exactly. Let’s pretend we’re rock stars and we’re just waking up from a gig last night. We’ll get a hotel room and order food and champagne and drink it in bed.

I flipped open my calendar. No meetings scheduled that afternoon. Nothing to do, except attack the work that had been piling up, that was always piling up. I got back on the computer. You serious?

There was no message for three or four minutes. I opened a proposed contract for the renewal of a talk show Forester’s company produced.

The computer dinged. James Hotel. Meet me in the lobby in thirty minutes.

That was something I loved about Sam—his ability to cut loose. He worked hard, and he didn’t fear responsibility even a little. But he could also toss it aside and have a hedonistic amount of fun.

An hour and a half later, we were rock stars.

In the center of the suite, a huge room-service cart was piled with a strange mix of every single thing that had struck our fancy—popcorn, filet mignon, lobster salad, cheeses, champagne, beer and a huge ice-cream sundae that was chilling on a bed of ice under a silver cover.

Sam had brought CDs from his office, and we blared the tunes.

“C’mere,” Sam growled at me at one point. He was standing at the side of the bed where I was sprawled in a haze of food and sex and music. He tugged me into a standing position and led me to the room-service cart. “We still have the ice-cream sundae, and I want to lick it off your collarbone.”

“I won’t say no to that.”

Sam held my hand in his warm grasp and with the other, lifted the silver cover off the sundae.

“Yum.” I pointed at the mounds of whip cream. “I can think of something better we can do with that.”

I began to kiss his neck. I loved the way he tasted right then—a little salty, a little sweet, a little something darker.

“Can you think of something we can do with this?”

I looked. Sam was pointing at the top of the sundae. I blinked. Looked closer. Something was imbedded in the cream, and it was sparkling. I leaned forward, peered harder. It looked, oddly, like the art deco ring we’d seen in a window of a jewelry store.

I glanced at Sam, whose cute face was simply beaming. He nodded.

“Is that …?”

He nodded again. He took the sparkle from the top of the sundae and wiped it off with the edge of his robe. “Baby,” he said, “you are a star. You’re my star. I want you shining in my life forever.”

Tears, like a cool, soothing rain, ran down my hot face. At the same time, I threw back my head and laughed. I had debated before about whether I wanted to get married. Sam and I had discussed the issue from every angle and we’d decided, in reasonable fashion, that we did want to get married eventually. But now, with Sam sinking to his knees, logic and reason were nowhere in the room. I was filled with a love so ferocious it seemed as though it could swirl around us and carry us out onto the street. I looked down at him, and my tears splashed his cheeks.

Now that Sam was gone, I started to doubt my memories of that day, the beauty of it, the beauty of us. Were Sam and I who I thought we were? Was Sam the man I knew? And without Sam, was I the same person I thought I was? I looked out the window into the rainy day and got no answers.

Grady Fisher pulled me out of my reverie when he stuck his head in my office. “Where have you been?”

I shot a look into the hallway. “Close the door, will you?”

Grady pushed the door closed and leaned back against it. His tie was loose, his shirtsleeves rolled high on his arms. “You all right?”

“I assume you’ve heard.”

“Yeah. Everyone has heard, or at least heard the gossip.” He paused. “I just want to know if you’re all right. Give me a yes or no. You don’t have to talk about it. You know that.”

“I do know that. Thank you.”

Grady and I had been buddies since graduation from law school. Professionally, we had been raised as brother and sister by our parents, the law firm of Baltimore & Brown. Grady was the sweetest guy—the kind who cleaned the firm kitchen when people left their microwave-popcorn bags out, the kind who bought a Streetwise newspaper from every homeless guy he saw, even though he already had a copy. When Grady and I were together, we didn’t get deep with each other on a regular basis. We talked about the law firm and general stuff about our dating lives. We bailed out one another by covering court calls and depositions, but emotionally we never pushed too hard.

“So, are you all right?” Grady asked. He looked worried.

I blinked. “I don’t know.”

He moved into the office and sat down. “I can’t believe Forester is …”

“Dead.”

He winced.

“Yeah.”

Everyone at the firm knew I was Forester’s girl. People had been malicious at first. After that initial case he had sent me I’d gotten more and more of his work. Then the rumors started that I was sleeping with him. Such talk rattled me. I tried to point out to everyone that Forester hadn’t even met me in person when he sent me the first case. No one cared. The talk continued.

It was only Grady who stuck up for me. I’d heard him once in a conference room, muttering, “Fuck you, dude, she’s a great lawyer,” to a clerk who had made a snide, sexual comment. It wasn’t exactly true—I wasn’t a great lawyer yet. The more I handled my own cases, the more I realized it took years, maybe even decades, to be a truly great attorney—but I appreciated Grady for saying it.

And it was also Grady who eventually told me, in his brief I-don’t-want-to-discuss-this-much way, to get over it.

Lots of Forester’s work was coming to me then. I’d gotten a huge bonus and a big office with a window and I got a portion of every new case I brought in. But I still was troubled about the way people were viewing me, and the pressure of the job was mounting.

“Izzy, enough bitching,” Grady said one day over a beer. “You’ve got it better than any other associate at this firm. Better than any other associate in the city probably. You need to work hard and make a ton of cash and just let all those dickheads root around in their jealousy. Shut up and enjoy it, okay?”

It was a radical instruction. Enjoy it. There isn’t a lot of talk about enjoyment in the law. Some attorneys love the law and some put up with it for the salary and the prestige, but rarely did you hear someone speak about deriving actual pleasure from the whole experience.

I made a conscious decision to ignore the gossip and sink myself deeper into the work. I got to know Forester better, and I both adored and respected him. I wore suits that were sexy, not caring if such attire led to discussions about how I’d used my looks to get ahead. Soon after, I found Q, who made the work all the more fun. I sometimes missed the fraternitylike camaraderie that other associates experienced. But I had Forester, and I had Q, and I had Grady, and when I needed a little less testosterone in my legal world, I had Maggie, and then eventually, to flesh out my personal life, I had Sam.

But now, two of those pieces were missing.

“So, what have you heard?” I asked.

“Sam is gone and so is fifty million worth of some kind of corporate shares.”

“Thirty million.”

Grady blinked.

“Allegedly, it’s thirty million,” I said, channeling Maggie. I rubbed my forehead, wanting desperately, even for a moment, to be away from all this. “Look, for just a second, can we pretend it’s yesterday. Before all this happened?”

“Sure.” Grady sat back in his chair.

“So.” What would Grady and I usually talk about?

“Got any trials coming up?” Grady asked. “I have to make sure I’m there to mop up the flop sweat.”

“Fuck you,” I said, feeling the relief of using curse words knowing we were about to talk about something that normally embarrassed the hell out of me.

Like siblings, we knew the other’s weaknesses. Grady’s was billing. And like the brother figure he was, Grady saw it as his job to ridicule me about mine—acute nervousness I occasionally experienced at the start of a trial that resulted in extreme perspiration.

The first time it happened was during my very first trial for Pickett Enterprises under the most mortifying of conditions—as if the devil had taken a coal straight from the furnace of hell and plopped it onto my body. The results were worse than Whitney Houston at the Super Bowl. Panicked, I asked the judge for a recess, locked myself in a bathroom stall and, using a nail file and my teeth, I cut the shoulder pads free from my suit. I put the suit back on and kept the shoulder pads tucked under my arms for the rest of the morning. My hand gestures were probably a bit mechanical, but it did the trick.

The upside of my little dilemma was that it had happened only a few times, only under severe stress, and it seemed to last just a few hours.

“Okay, new topic,” I said. “Dating anybody?”

Grady was a catch—dark-brown hair (most of it still there), a charming, wide grin and a great intellect that never made anyone else feel small.

“Ellen,” he answered.

“Ellen is back?”

“Ellen is definitely back.”

“Great.” I liked Ellen. “Does she want a ring?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to give it to her this time?”

“I might.”

Grady had told me over and over, I don’t want to be with the same person all the time. Plus, Ellen and I aren’t like you and Sam. We’re not in love like that.

“So this thing with Sam.” Grady trailed off.

“I don’t know anything.” The image of his blue suit seared my mind. “New topic.”

There was an uncomfortable silence.

“I don’t know what else to talk about right now,” Grady said.

I made an exasperated sound.

“Well, it’s true. I feel like an ass talking about my dating life when you just lost the client you loved and your fiancé.”

“I did not lose my fiancé.”

“So where is he?”

“I’ve simply misplaced him. New topic, please.”

Just then, the door flew open and Q sprinted into my office. “Iz,” Q whispered. “The police are here.”

13

Two men stepped into my office. Somberly, they introduced themselves as Detectives Damon Vaughn and Frank Schneider. They both wore pants and fall jackets that looked slightly bulky. When Detective Schneider unzipped his jacket, I realized they were both wearing bulletproof vests and guns in holsters at their waists.

The sight of those guns crystallized the intensity of the situation. This was serious. Deadly serious.

Grady left. I knew I should call Maggie—she was a criminal defense lawyer after all—but the problem was that Maggie would tell me not to talk to them. I had heard her tell people many times, Don’t speak to the cops. Never talk to them unless they arrest you. Maggie had seen many interrogations go awry; she’d seen suspects confess to crimes they didn’t commit. As a result, she viewed Chicago cops with the same wariness usually reserved for perfume-counter salesladies. Just say no thanks, Maggie would say, and walk away fast.

But I wasn’t a suspect here. I couldn’t see any way that I’d be considered a part in anything that had happened. More importantly, the detectives might know something about Forester. And Sam. If I just said “no, thanks,” I wouldn’t be able to find out what they knew.

“Have a seat, please,” I said.

The detectives sank into their chairs. Schneider was a big guy, whose bulk draped over the chair. Detective Vaughn was lean, a runner, I guessed.

With hands the size of Frisbees, Detective Schneider held a form with white lettering while Vaughn sat motionless and watched me move behind my desk to take a seat. I was used to men looking at me, and yet his gaze wasn’t as simple as being sized up by a guy hungry for a post-bar make-out. He was scrutinizing me.

Detective Schneider raised his eyes to me. He glanced at my hair and smiled. “My girlfriend in college was a redhead. Mindy Draper.”

“Mmm,” I said in a noncommittal way. For some reason, many people think all redheads are connected, maybe by a secret society that provided photos and contact information.

Detective Schneider dropped the chat. “We just have a couple of questions.” His voice was low and soft, but there was a rumble to it that was almost menacing. “We’re looking into the death of Forester Pickett.”

“Good. Great.” I felt a window of relief open in the room. Forester had asked me to look into the matter if something happened to him, and now I could be assured that someone was doing that.

“You were Forester Pickett’s attorney,” Schneider said.

“That’s right.”

“What kind of business was Mr. Pickett in?” I had the feeling he knew the answer already, but I explained that Forester was the Midwest’s largest media mogul. He owned radio stations, newspapers, magazines, publishing companies and television studios. As his attorney, I did his contractual work, and I defended the company if it was sued.

“Was he involved in any takeovers?” Schneider asked. “Any corporate messiness?”

“No,” I answered.

He asked a few more similar questions, all vague. I knew he was fishing, which was what he was supposed to do, but I grew impatient.

“Look,” I said, “I’ve got to tell you that Forester had been receiving threats.”

“What kind of threats?” Detective Vaughn said, speaking up for the first time.

“He received anonymous letters saying he was too old for his job and that he should step down.”

The detectives exchanged a glance, then looked back at me, and it was as if the air shifted into something brittle, crackling.

“Do you have copies?” Vaughn asked.

“No. I never saw them.”

As I had that day Forester was in my office, I felt my youth then. As his attorney, I should have insisted that I get copies of the letters. I should have had them analyzed. But Forester said he didn’t want to take action at that time, and no one told Forester Pickett what to do.

“How many letters were there?” Schneider asked in his rumbling voice.

I tried to think of the one conversation we’d had about it. “I don’t know.”

“What did they say other than he was too old?”

Why hadn’t I asked to see the letters? “I don’t know. There was also a homeless man who threatened him on two occasions.”

“Tell us about that.”

“Forester told me both times happened outside the Pickett offices. A homeless man came up to him and said if he wasn’t careful he would join Olivia. Olivia was Forester’s wife. She passed away from ovarian cancer.”

“When was that?”

“He told me about the homeless guy two weeks ago. I got the impression the incidents had taken place recently.”

Schneider blinked at me. Wrote nothing down. “What I meant was when did his wife pass away?”

I could easily remember Forester talking about Olivia, or Liv, as he called her. They had met when he was twenty-three and about to close on his first radio station. Forester had gone to a men’s clothing store to buy his very first suit. Liv’s father owned the store, and she was working that day. Forester said he was immediately “smitten.” For their first date, he took her to the closing. “She helped me with that suit,” Forester had said, “and she helped me with that closing, and then she helped me with life.” His face would always sag when he spoke about her.

“I believe Olivia passed away twelve or thirteen years ago,” I told Detective Schneider.

“Did Mr. Pickett file a police report about this homeless guy?” Vaughn asked.

“No. He said no crime had been committed.”

He grunted. “He was right. Doesn’t sound like much of anything to me.”

I crossed my fingers and leaned forward—the pose I always took during contract negotiations or depositions when I sensed things were about to get tough. “It doesn’t sound like anything? He gets these letters and then a homeless guy tells him to be careful or he’ll join his dead wife, and then he dies, suddenly, and that doesn’t sound like anything to you?”

Vaughn raised an eyebrow. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Did you want him to step down?”

“No!”

Vaughn glanced around my cluttered office, then stared warily at my law-school diploma hanging on the wall. “You’re pretty young to be handling all this legal work for Pickett, aren’t you?”

“Technically, yes.”

“How did you get it?”

“Forester. He chose me to be his lead attorney.”

He glanced at my chest, then back to my face. “Why?”

A good question. He must have seen the hesitation in my face. He leaned forward, his eyes lasering onto mine. “You sure you didn’t want him to step down?”

I was overwhelmed with the work. It was too much. But I didn’t want it to go away. I didn’t want Forester to go away.

“No, of course not. Forester is the reason I have this job,” I said.

The detectives looked at each other again, then back at me.

Schneider shrugged. “Look, at this point, our investigation into Mr. Pickett’s death is really just a formality, given the autopsy.”

“The autopsy results are already available?” I knew from some medical cases I’d worked on during law school that autopsies usually took a couple of days, sometimes a week.

“Yeah.” Schneider flipped through his notebook. “Mr. Pickett’s son got somebody to push that through.”

Why, I wondered, would Shane want to rush the autopsy? “What were the results?”

Schneider glanced back down at his notebook. “Acute myocardial infarction.”

“Heart attack.”

“Yeah. Likely caused by the usual—high blood pressure, age, history of smoking.”

“But Forester’s blood pressure was under control. He hasn’t smoked in years.”

“He had all the classic signs—he was slumped over when the EMTs found him, and he was clutching his chest.”

I squeezed my eyes shut at the image.

“We did get a tip that something might not be right with this guy’s death,” Schneider said.

“Wait, you got a tip about Forester’s death?”

Vaughn shot his partner a shut-up kind of glance, but Schneider just lifted his massive shoulders up, then let them drop. He nodded at me. Why did I get the feeling their little exchange was just for show?

“Who left the tip?” I said.

Another shrug. “Anonymous. We tested his food from that night. Clean. And Mr. Pickett’s cardiologist saw him in the emergency room after he coded. He signed the death certificate saying it was a heart attack.”

“But Forester had recently had a stress test. He said he passed with flying colors.”

“The guy had a heart attack before. You’re always at risk for another one. Could happen to anyone.”

But Forester wasn’t just anyone.

“Now, having thirty million dollars in corporate shares stolen,” Vaughn said, speaking up, “that’s a little unusual.”

I met his eyes. I felt a blush creep over my neck, but I didn’t move an inch. An uncomfortable silence filled the room as Detective Vaughn and I stared at each other. If he thought I would flinch first, talk first, he was absolutely wrong. I might doubt my legal abilities on occasion, but in a staring contest, I would always win.

Ten seconds passed, then twenty, thirty.

Schneider cleared his throat again. “You were engaged to Sam Hollings?”

“I am engaged to Sam Hollings,” I said without moving my eyes from Vaughn’s.

“When is the last time you saw him?”

“Yesterday. After work. We had a meeting with our wedding coordinator.”

Vaughn chuckled, scornfully it seemed. Still, we stared at one another.

“He was supposed to take you to some shindig last night, huh?” Vaughn said with an upward flick of the corner of his mouth.